Baltic Missionary Memories: Keeping Secrets: Karosta and Šķēde

Before we left Liepaja, Elder Adams wanted to show us something he had seen before while visiting the city. It was on the beach which was just a short walk away.

It is a sculpture of a woman on a pedestal, looking out to sea.

Her arm is shading her eyes as she looks westward and her hair is blowing in the breeze behind her. What could she be looking for?

She is looking for missing Americans.

It seems that on April 8, 1950, a US Navy plane, flying over international waters was shot down off the coast of Liepaja by four Soviet fighter planes and all 10 Navy officers on board disappeared. The Soviets had a secret (or maybe not so secret) naval submarine base at Liepaja and didn't care for American planes spying on it.

What she looks at everyday...

There are rumors the pilots escaped and parachuted into the water but by the time a search and rescue party could get to the Baltic Sea, nothing was found of any survivors. Later, a fishing boat found a partially inflated life raft and questions arose about the fate of the crew. The Cold War was in full swing in 1950 and this incident didn't help reconcile the East with the West.

The memorial was dedicated April 8, 2000, exactly 50 years after the attack. It was nice of Liepaja to put up a monument so no one would forget what happened to those American men, because neither Elder or Sister Davis had been born when it happened, and now we know a little more about our own history than we did before. These are the names of the "lost" Americans:

Our next stop was a place Elder Adams wanted to see and we actually found without the help of our GPS. He was looking for the secret Soviet submarine base, the missing American plane had probably been searching for. It is in the small city of Karosta, a small town just north of Liepaja that used to be a Naval Base.

Karosta means "war port" and construction started in 1890 to make a heavily fortified military base for Tsar Alexander III. The fully independent city was finished in 1906 with beautiful buildings, a colorful Orthodox Church and unique architecture. It had it's own power plant, sewage system, church and schools and at it's prime had 20,000 inhabitants.

After World War II, it became the home of the Soviet Baltic Fleet because its central location in the Baltic Sea and the fact that the port does not ice over in winter. The Soviet Navy base in Liepāja was made a secret territory and was closed to public. The neighborhood now reflects the differences between the military elegance of tsarist Russia and Soviet militarism. When the Russian army left Latvia in 1994, Karosta became largely uninhabited and most structures fell to ruin. And now it is a tourist attraction for those who are curious about history.

We will start by showing you the beautifully designed buildings that are deteriorating in Karosta....

a dilapidated mansion, said to have housed the tsar for a brief time.

We don't know what this building was used for, which could be said for 90% of the buildings we saw...

A local girl told us this huge open air building used to be the riding arena for the Russian nobility.

The water tower:

And the Karosta Prison...said to be haunted. It is used as a unique and spooky hotel of sorts...guests spend the night in cells. We were told that the show Ghost Hunters came to Karosta and spent the night here. A nice place to come for Halloween...

There were so many huge buildings falling into ruin, it was a sad sight and reminded us of an elaborate and elegant ghost town.

And the one thing repaired and put back into use?

St. Nicholas Orthodox Cathedral.

This church has quite a history. On the outbreak of World War I, many items from the church were evacuated to Russia including the bells and icons. During the 1920s and 1930s, under the Latvian government, the Church was adapted to the needs of the Liepāja garrison's Lutherans.

After World War II, The Soviet leaders made the cathedral into a cinema and a recreation and entertainment room for the sailors and soldiers. They bricked up the central cupola (thereby ruining the great acoustics) so navel personnel could better hear the films.

And now it is back into the hands of clergy and being used for its primary purpose.

And now we look at the buildings the soviets built for their military personnel. The photo below shows empty apartment buildings...

This photo shows the apartments that were individually sold to people after independence and that people now call home.

The port itself is still used by shipping companies.

Driving around Karosta gives you feelings of melancholy, of what once was and what could be again. There just aren't enough people left in Latvia to make this a viable city, yet. But Elder Adams was still trying to find the submarine base...so we headed down any street that led to the water and most of the streets were blocked by fences and gates...except one.
And that is where we saw this:

It sure looks like a good place to hide a submarine doesn't it? There were several of these along the port water front and we were very lucky to have found them.

Along the beach itself, old fortifications that the Soviets blew up, now lie in the Baltic Sea:

Well, that was an interesting side trip. And now Elder Davis gets his turn; he is headed to the infamous Šķēde dunes, just north of Liepaja...

Šķēde was a place on the Baltic Sea just a few kilometers north of Liepaja with beautiful sand dunes and pine forests. It has become infamous as a holocaust site. During a three day period from 15-17 December 1941, in the height of a freezing Baltic winter, some 2,749 Jews were killed by firing squads. The victims, mostly women and children, were forced to undress in the freezing snow covered dunes and shot in front of mass graves.

This memorial was erected June 2005, 64 years later.

Also killed and buried in the dunes:

2,000 Soviet prisoners of war, 1,000 Latvian civilians, and all total 3,640 Jews.

The memorial is in the shape of a giant menorah, it's base and arms made of walls of stone.

The pillars on the end of the "candlesticks", represent flames.

The Šķēde dunes became infamous because of SS-Uberscharfuhrer, Carl-Emil Strott, who (unbelievably) took photos of the killings at Šķēde. These photos were found by David Zivcon, a courageous Jew, who was working as a forced labourer electrician. Zivcon, managed to steal, copy and replace the photos. These photos of what happened at Šķēde have become some of the most notorious images of the holocaust and were used in the Nuremburg trials. You will see these same images in the National Holocaust Museum in Washington DC and in most books written about the Holocaust.

Wild grasses cover the dunes now...but you can see where pits had been dug and mounds remain.

The Jewish victims faced the Baltic Sea as they were shot from behind.

Only 3% of Liepaja Jews survived the Nazi occupation either by surviving concentration camps, being hidden, or having a skill the Nazi needed thus performing slave labor. After the war, the Soviet regime treated Jewish survivors with great suspicion, presuming any Jew not killed by the Nazi must have collaborated with them. Many were sent to Soviet gulags. Not surprisingly, many emigrated to Israel or the West when the opportunity arose in the 1970s.

As we looked at at the beautiful Baltic Sea where a storm was blowing over, we felt a gnawing sadness and disappointment in our fellow man. But as missionaries we have a brightness of hope that mankind can learn from history and through the gospel of Jesus Christ change the hearts of men to want to do good and to turn away from evil.

We headed back to Riga through lush green landscapes, under blue skies with billowing white clouds. The photo below shows the reverence Latvians have for oak trees. Farmers plow around them in their fields and we often see scenes like this:

Aizpute is one of the oldest towns in Latvia founded in 1378. But before that a Livonion Order castle built here was mentioned in chronicles of 1249. There is nothing left but ruins today but the town was still an interesting place to visit.

Aizpute is a charming place....

And our next stop was a town Elder & Sister Davis had been once before and fell in love with, Kuldiga. We wanted to share it with Elder & Sister Adams: